Goofs

When Lin is escorting Frank and Ray to the "Narrow Corridors" before entering the Kumite for the first time, he greets the older Asian man who famously says "OK USA!" At that time, Lin has a scruffy beard. When they get to the Kumite to meet the judges, he is clean shaven. Later on in that scene, his beard returns.

Right after the shot of Pumola (the sumo fighter) falling to the mat after being defeated by Dux, there is a cut to Ray and Lin cheering him on. However, Pumola is seen still sitting behind the two of them in the upper right corner.

In the final fight, Dux's hair goes from very sweaty to dry back to sweaty again after he is blinded and knocked down the ramp.

Parades gets his leg broken in the fight with Chong Li. However, throughout the next several scenes he is unhurt and seated on the bleachers.

Right after Chong Li kills the opponent, he walks over to Frank and points at him. In the next shot his arm is down, he raises it and points again and says: "You are next."

In his first fight at the Kumite, Dux sets a record of 12.2 seconds for a knockout, beating Chong Li's previous record of 14.8 seconds. Later in the competition, Dux knocks the large African fighter out with two blows in a shade under 8 seconds (despite the fighter's comical pre-fight theatrics), but this is not recognized by the tournament organizers as yet another new record.

At the end of the movie, they show fastest kick with a knockout in MPH, but the fastest punch with a knockout is shown in seconds. In order to be calculated in seconds, the "fastest punch with a knockout" should have said "fastest knockout with a punch"

In a flashback to young Dux's childhood, while accompanying his friends to steal Tanaka's sword, Frank is wearing a New York (football) Giants jersey and a San Francisco (baseball) Giants hat. The baseball Giants left New York City after the 1957 season, long before the setting of the flashback scene. Most baseball Giants fans in New York did not transfer their allegiance to the team when they moved to San Francisco. Rather, they and likewise alienated Dodgers fans from Brooklyn lobbied for a National League expansion team in New York, which they received in 1962, when the New York Mets began play. Still, it was difficult to find a fan of both the baseball and football Giants after 1957, because the baseball Giants had left, and the football Giants played in the Bronx, at the home of the rival New York Yankees. The more realistic baseball and football clothing combinations would have been NY Mets and NY Jets, NY Yankees and NY Giants, or SF Giants and SF 49ers.

When Dux and Jackson are playing Karate Champ together, a closer look at the screen reveals that it is in single-player mode.

When Frank and Ray play the video game what happens in the game has nothing to do with the way they operate the controllers.

At the beginning of his fight with Pumola, Jean-Claude Van Damme kicks him in the left pec. In the next shot, Pumola is rubbing his right pec.

When the Colonel is speaking to the Lieutenant, it's obvious the Colonel voice has been dubbed over.

The film is from 1988, the flashback scene is at least 10 years prior. During the flashback scene in which Frank defends Shingo from school bullies, one of the onlookers is wearing a "Bartles and Jaymes" T-Shirt. Bartles and Jaymes was introduced in 1985.

During the epilogue, it states that Frank Dux retired from active competition in 1980, thus, all of the events in this movie are supposed to take place in or before 1980. Before the Kumite, in which Dux competes, Dux and Jackson are playing the arcade game Karate Champ, which didn't come out until 1984.

The Kumite is supposedly a sixty-round no-holds-barred tournament. This is mathematically impossible. Full-contact martial arts tournaments are always single elimination events (meaning you are out of the competition if you lose once) because of the risk of serious injury.

This results in a phenomenon where adding one round to the tournament requires a doubling of the number of participants. A one-round contest has two participants, a two-round contest has four participants, a three-round contest has eight participants, and so forth. The mathematical formula one can use to determine the number of participants needed for the number of rounds is "two to the power of [number of rounds]". Two to the power of sixty is more than a hundred and forty-four million times the number of people that exist on this planet in the year 2022.

Ray Jackson receives an invitation to an elite martial arts tournament despite having absolutely no martial arts skills.

During the opening ceremonies around the 34 minute mark. Jackson makes the remark "they're gonna love me here". Boom clearly visible in bottom right hand corner of the frame for ~5 seconds during this conversation.

When Dux is running from the army men they are seen standing on a boat. The older man literally throws himself backward into the water rather than accidentally falling.

The Kumite coordinators demand that Dux proves he knows Dim Mac to show that Tanaka is indeed his Shidoshi before honoring his invitation to the tournament. When they say Dim Mac, they pronounce it like "mock." Jackson immediately answers "What the hell is a Dim Mac," pronouncing it like "Mack." If he didn't know what it was, then how would he have known the correct spelling to lead him to believe that it should be pronounced like "Mack" instead of "mock?"